New year, new year’s resolutions (OK a bit belated, but I am just getting going). I have three targets for this year and over the year I will report on my progress.

The first is (rather boringly) to try to do one hours exercise a day. Age and too much good food make it a necessity. So far, my record is patchy. Most days I manage at least half an hours walking and two or three days a week I manage to do an hour. But other days it just does not seem to happen and given I live in Valencia I cannot use the weather as an excuse. I’ve always resisted the Fitbit type devices but I’ve finally been persuaded to try installing am Android pedometer. I am curious whether I will love it or hate it (or, more likely, just forget about it.

Living in Valencia drives me to the second resolution – to learn Spanish. Last year I signed up for a course but gave up after about eight lessons. Basically, the course was following a text book with weekly lessons on Spanish grammar. Not my way of learning. Now I have a new book, called Hacking Spanish, which seems a better way to do things. The difficulty is once more putting aside an hour a day to learn.

Target number three is related to this blog. I have written over 1500 articles on the Wales wide Web spanning more than 10 years. Yet last year I found it harder and harder to commit myself to (electronic) print. There were a few reasons, I think. The main one was that I had a research and writing intensive government contract which I was not allowed to publish without permission. After a long days writing, the idea of blogging about something different was just too much. We also want to relaunch the Pontydysgu web site this year. After ten years the design is looking a little jaded! We have a new design set up and we are beginning to populate the site. More details on this to follow quite soon I hope

This entry was posted
on Friday, January 26th, 2018 at 09:11 and is filed under Wales Wide Web.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Search Pontydysgu.org

News Bites

Open Educational Resources

BYU researcher John Hilton has published a new study on OER, student efficacy, and user perceptions – a synthesis of research published between 2015 and 2018. Looking at sixteen efficacy and twenty perception studies involving over 120,000 students or faculty, the study’s results suggest that students achieve the same or better learning outcomes when using OER while saving a significant amount of money, and that the majority of faculty and students who’ve used OER had a positive experience and would do so again.

Digital Literacy

A National Survey fin Wales in 2017-18 showed that 15% of adults (aged 16 and over) in Wales do not regularly use the internet. However, this figure is much higher (26%) amongst people with a limiting long-standing illness, disability or infirmity.

A new Welsh Government programme has been launched which will work with organisations across Wales, in order to help people increase their confidence using digital technology, with the aim of helping them improve and manage their health and well-being.

Digital Communities Wales: Digital Confidence, Health and Well-being, follows on from the initial Digital Communities Wales (DCW) programme which enabled 62,500 people to reap the benefits of going online in the last two years.

Figures from the UK Higher Education Statistics Agency show that in total almost 11,500 people – both academics and support staff – working in universities on a standard basis were on a zero-hours contract in 2017-18, out of a total staff head count of about 430,000, reports the Times Higher Education. Zero-hours contract means the employer is not obliged to provide any minimum working hours

Separate figures that only look at the number of people who are employed on “atypical” academic contracts (such as people working on projects) show that 23 per cent of them, or just over 16,000, had a zero-hours contract.

Resistance decreases over time

Interesting research on student centered learning and student buy in, as picked up by an article in Inside Higher Ed. A new study published in PLOS ONE, called “Knowing Is Half the Battle: Assessments of Both Student Perception and Performance Are Necessary to Successfully Evaluate Curricular Transformation finds that student resistance to curriculum innovation decreases over time as it becomes the institutional norm, and that students increasingly link active learning to their learning gains over time